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The idea is that we will try to address both. Instead of just "tax cuts for the rich" that ignore some very basic issues, the idea is to balance both out - going for the more long term view, which is pretty freaking alien to Washington, and actually constitutes the "change" that he campaigned on, not that you all are not too busy calling him a liar to notice it.

Nobody's saying "tax cuts for the rich" is the way to go. You're ignoring the issue altogether because you've got your head so far up his ass you can't see what's going on.

In 2001 and 2003, President George W Bush signed into law various tax cuts. I’d like to quote the following from a May 2008 Kiplinger magazine article by Knight Kiplinger entitled “Fuzzy Tax Talk:”

Those laws slashed tax bills of low- and middle-income families, sometimes down to zero for those with several children (each of whom is now worth a $1,000 tax credit). The percentage declines for upper-income people were much smaller; but in terms of actual dollar amounts, the wealthy received the bulk of the savings because they pay the most income taxes.

Specifically, with regard to the wealthy, Bush lowered the marginal tax rates for those with incomes over $350,000 (the top tax rate, admittedly on the rich) from 40% to 35%. He also approved the lowering of the capital gains tax from 20% to 15% (which helps everyone who owns stock, real estate, or any other sell-able asset, but admittedly most benefits the wealthiest members of society since they own more of those assets).

That’s what he did for the “rich.” But he also lowered every OTHER tax bracket (from 15, 28, 31, 36, and 39.6 percent to 10, 15, 25, 28, 33, and 35 percent) and added other of tax credits and breaks for the “poor” such as the child care tax credit, AMT, and earned income tax credit. The following data is taken from the articleBush’s Tax Cuts Are Unfair…:

If you and your spouse have a taxable income of $60,000 a year, you’ve had almost a 24 percent income tax cut since President Bush took office. (And ditto if your income was just $20,000.) Meanwhile, the folks who make $350,000 a year got a cut of only about 12.5 percent; those who make $1 million a year got an even smaller cut. Pre-Bush, the $1 million a year couple paid 33 times as much as the $60,000 couple; today they pay more than 38 times as much.

Overall, the biggest percentage cuts went to the poorest of the poor (those with incomes in the $10,000 range) and the next biggest to those making about $60,000. Surprised? I bet not; you’re wondering about the other cuts - the ones on dividends, capital gains, and inheritance taxes that allegedly skew gains to the rich. Well lets add all those changes in, along with all the other Bush tax breaks such as the child-care tax credit, the earned income tax credit, the AMT, etc.:

The biggest percentage tax cut—about 17.6 percent—went to taxpayers in the second-lowest quintile, that is to taxpayers with below-average incomes. After that, the size of the tax cut falls off as you move from the lower middle to the middle middle (12.6 percent) to the upper middle class (9.9 percent). It rises again slightly for the top quintile, but only to a little over 11 percent.

[Click the article above for a chart of this data.]

Here’s the real kicker. The data shows that the tax code has gotten even MORE progressive since Bush took office (skewed so the richer pay a bigger percentage of their income to taxes than the poorer), and that kind of change is really hard to undo. But federal spending dramatically increased as well; eventually (soon and very soon) Americans are going to have to pay for that. Taxes will rise again no matter who next takes office.

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I'd like to agree with the data, as I know that the poorest did get some breaks. But the problem is that the rich people have a lot of ways they employ to get out of paying their share of taxes; the poor do not. From the comments:

Stephen Landsburg's contention that Bush gave his largest tax cuts to the poor is obviously wrong, but his statistical slight of hand -- to assume that the federal income tax is the only tax -- is just stupid.

To illustrate: Bush has increased the exemption from the estate tax (on the way to full repeal for one year in 2010). Almost all of the tax savings from the higher exemption go to the best-off one percent. But because the higher exemption entirely wipes out estate taxes for the "poorest" taxable estates, the share of the estate tax paid by the top one percent has gone up. Does that make the estate tax cut progressive? Of course, not.

Likewise, Bush's income tax cuts have sharply reduced the progressive income tax, but haven't touched regressive taxes like payroll taxes and excise taxes. So while Bush may have reduced income taxes by a greater percentage for people in the middle and low ends of the income scale than for people at the top, the income tax was already very low for low- and middle-income people. So let's look at some more valid measures:

o As a percentage of all federal, state and local taxes, Bush's reductions equal 12% for the top 1%, 3% for the poor, and 7-8% for everyone else.

o As a percentage of income, Bush has cut taxes by 4.3% at the top, 0.7% at the bottom, and 2-3% for everyone else.

Landsburg also says he rejects the idea that taxes should be based on either ability to pay or on the benefits that people gain from our society -- either of which would call for much, much more progressive taxes than we have now. Instead, he says that everyone, poor or rich, should pay the same dollar amount in taxes. That would either bankrupt tens of millions of families (and impoverish others) or destroy the United States as a functioning nation. It's also morally indefensible.

--Robert McIntyre

Robert McIntyre is director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a nonprofit research group that promotes progressive taxation.

I guess you are going to believe what you want to believe on this one; however, cutting taxes and starting a war never have mixed too well and it was a big mistake to do both at the same time.

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I'd like to agree with the data, as I know that the poorest did get some breaks. But the problem is that the rich people have a lot of ways they employ to get out of paying their share of taxes; the poor do not. From the comments:

I guess you are going to believe what you want to believe on this one; however, cutting taxes and starting a war never have mixed too well and it was a big mistake to do both at the same time.